Marketers are always seeking better ways to create, execute, and automate campaigns with the goal of growing revenue and strengthening customer loyalty. A business process management (BPM) engine, or workflow engine, can be used to design and implement business execution actions such as, for example, business execution actions used in marketing campaigns, compensation calculation models, supply chain management, etc. In the marketing campaign example, a marketer can use the BPM engine to configure a series of connected workflow execution components that serve to prosecute aspects of a marketing campaign.
One workflow execution item in the example of Internet marketing campaigns is the generation of personalized messages to be sent to a set of target recipients. Such personalized message can take the form of a web page, an advertisement, an email communication, a text message, a mobile message, etc. In a conventional process for generating personalized messages, during a design phase, the marketer designs a template for personalized messages. The template includes stock message sections and personalization sections. The stock message sections contain marketing or other communication messages that are the same for all recipients of the personalized message. The personalization sections include commands defined by the marketer that invoke queries to the marketer's relational database management system (RDBMS) or any other database system, which stores the marketer's audience records and respective demographics of individual recipients in the list. During an execution phase, coordinated processes iterate through audience records in the database system and execute queries, the results of which are used to populate personalization sections of a template. The personalized messages are then sent out to the target recipients. A marketer then launches subsequent campaigns, possibly using a different message template, and/or a different set of queries. The aforementioned process may need to be repeated many times for many different marketing campaigns.